The Operative (25 page)

‘What the fuck,’ he exclaimed as he looked around.

Stratton sat up, feigning shock and fear as another officer ran up to him.

‘What happened, Joe?’ one of the lawyers shouted above the noise of the alarms.

‘Don’t know,’ came the reply.

‘I heard a gun,’ Stratton called out. ‘In one of the cubicles.’

‘You hurt?’ the first officer asked him.

‘No.’

The buzzers continued to sound and were joined by the noise of banging on the cubicle doors, adding to the confusion.

‘Stay there. Don’t move,’ one of the officers said to Stratton as they made their way along the corridor and into the smoke.

Stratton didn’t waste a second. He got to his feet and slipped through the door, closing it behind him. The guard’s key was still in the lock so he turned it and left it in place. One of the officers saw the door close and called out as he hurried to it, yanking hard on the doorknob as he looked through the small window in time to see Stratton race up the stairs. He grabbed his radio.

Stratton made it to the top of the stairs at full speed. As he reached the door he slowed down and pushed calmly through it.

Most of the people in the crowded hall were listening to the alarm bells and asking those close by what was going on. The
entire courthouse appeared to have come to a standstill after the explosion except for those officers who were running about listening to radios and trying to ascertain what was happening.

Stratton pushed through the crowd towards the front door where he saw several officers gathering. He paused to consider an alternative escape plan but could not think of one other than the obvious. ‘Fire!’ he called out. ‘There’s a fire below!’

It had the immediate desired effect. The crowd made a general move that soon became a panicky surge towards the entrance. Officers, as confused as everyone else, were pushed aside by those wanting to flee until one of them picked up a radio message. He called for his partners to close the doors and not let anyone out.

The officers’ concerted effort to push the large double doors shut only served to fuel the panic among those trying to get out. They shoved against the officers even harder.

Stratton got to the doors and added his weight to the would-be escapers. Along with a handful of others, he managed to squeeze outside just before the officers succeeded in closing the doors. He kept on going and crossed the parking lot briskly while removing his false moustache and glasses. A moment later he was heading down the street towards a large mall two blocks from the beach between the courthouse and his apartment building, leaving the pandemonium behind him.

Inside the mall entrance all was calm with no one remotely aware of what had happened a block away. Stratton dumped the removable parts of his disguise in a trash bin before casually making his way to another entrance and across the street to his apartment building.

It was a bright sunny day and Stratton’s heart rate was almost back to normal by the time he rounded the corner onto Santa Monica Boulevard where the blue-grey sea glistened beyond the palm trees that ran along the top of the cliff. He was confident that he had made a clean escape. Next would come the wait to
determine the success or otherwise of his mission. With a regular mission it was not unusual to have to wait hours and sometimes days to learn the outcome of an attack: quite often it required satellite surveillance or other forms of high-tech intelligence to ascertain damage. In this case Stratton would use the best intelligence source of any criminal or terrorist organisation and that was the media. In his experience the media was generally a very poor source of accurate information since they were more concerned with drama. But in this case he felt that he could rely on them.

All in all, Stratton felt good about the little operation and could not help thinking now about finishing the job and going after Ardian. It seemed that now he had started he should finish. The internal voices of caution returned but he was tiring of them. They were right, of course, but so were the others. Besides, what was particularly sweet about killing Ardian was that he was the brother of the prick who had tried to kill Stratton in the limousine.

It was well worth carrying out a feasibility study, Stratton reckoned. If it looked good, there’d be another test run.

Hobart arrived at the main entrance of the Santa Monica District courthouse as the sun was setting behind him. He walked towards the door at the far end of the courtroom lobby where a couple of police officers stood guard. He knew his way around, having made several recent visits to the building. As he approached the door he flipped open his FBI badge and clipped it to the breast pocket of his jacket. The officers were already inspecting the badge as he walked towards them and stood aside to let him through.

He walked down the steps and paused in the doorway of the interview room to observe the activity. A camera flashed inside a cubicle somewhere towards the end while several officers in plain clothes were inspecting the area and taking samples.

‘Is it okay to walk through here yet?’ Hobart asked no one in particular.

One of the officers looked up, saw the badge, and waved him in. ‘Walk down the centre and keep clear of that area,’ the man said, indicating the seating alcove.

Hobart obeyed the instructions and stopped outside a cubicle inside which were two more officers. One was examining the far wall, which was spattered with dark bloodstains, while the other stood still, looking at the floor while holding his chin and apparently contemplating something. Hobart had been an FBI agent for nearly twenty years and had long since learned that time spent patiently studying people and crime scenes before talking to anyone or touching anything was often productive.

Hobart’s early working years had primarily been devoted to the eastern seaboard of the USA, mostly New York and Washington DC, followed by nine years in Eastern Europe, specifically the Balkans. He’d spent the last eighteen months in Los Angeles, the FBI’s single most heavily populated territory. He had worked so long for the massive bureaucratic machine that his youthful eagerness, zeal and keen response to the dramatic had become dulled. He had hoped, too, by this stage in his career to be further up the promotional ladder. Too many disappointments, more than anything else with the organisation’s unhealthy indulgence in politics, had dampened much of the fervour which had originally inspired him in his chosen vocation. But he was not a burn-out and had lost none of his enthusiasm for the purity of the job. A fire of some kind still smouldered somewhere deep inside him, fuelled by hostility towards the enemies of his country. He often suspected that much of what he had left was a kind of patriotic mania or anger. Not the best reason to get up each morning and go to work.

Hobart was something of a dormant volcano and it was that aspect of his character that made him memorable to others, the impression he gave that he was about to erupt at any moment. What kept him on an even keel was the belief against all the odds that there was someone somewhere on top of this wasteful, misguided heap of bureaucracy who actually knew what they were doing and had a plan for a saner and more logical solution to the madness of the world.

Hobart’s wife, a former journalist for the
Washington Post
, always accused him of naivety when it came to his work, usually when she was drunk – which, fortunately, was not often. Her most damaging rhetoric, however, came when she was sober. She had written several accusatory articles about the FBI, exposing incompetence, misinterpretation of intelligence and inappropriate use of funds. Although her exposés were, in the great scheme of things,
a small cry in the dark, she was as irritating as a paper cut to Hobart’s superiors, sufficiently so for them to include an unwritten condition to his offer of promotion to the LA office: she would have to quit her job on the
Post
and accompany him to the West Coast. To Hobart’s surprise, she agreed without much of a fight. It seemed that he wasn’t the only one in the family who had grown cynical about their contribution to world enlightenment.

Hobart was robust, though. He applied this quality to his own shortcomings when he recognised them, or when they were pointed out to him by his wife. But it was things over which he had no control that frustrated him most and contributed more than anything else to his private cynicism. Most of these things were politicians.

It was during Hobart’s tour of duty in the Balkans that the greatest blow to his confidence regarding US foreign policy, specifically on Kosovo, had been dealt. But even though he felt isolated in his views – enough not to air them with fellow agents, at least – he still wanted to believe there was an intelligent game plan in place. When the Los Angeles posting came along he was content to put aside his private concerns, expecting to be preoccupied with more routine FBI work – until he arrived in his new office and was briefed on his chief assignment and told why, in fact, he had been on the shortlist for the job.

All Hobart’s troubling thoughts returned with a vengeance when he realised that, despite being on the other side of the world now, he was going to be drawn even deeper into the gut of his old East European problem. But had he been told that he would soon find himself in such a dark place that he would tear down the pillar principles on which his entire professional life had been built and light a fuse that would start a war against one of the most powerful crime lords in America, he would not have believed it.

‘What happened?’ Hobart asked.

Both scene-of-crime officers looked up at the three white letters of his badge boldly emblazoned on a black background and then at Hobart himself. He was used to every kind of response from fellow law-enforcers who were not directly connected with the Bureau. The expressions on the faces of the two cops in front of him conveyed the most common reaction: ‘What’s the god-damned FBI doing here?’

‘A detainee got whacked,’ the officer who had been contemplating the universe offered while the other went back to picking at the brick wall with a small tool.

‘I know that much,’ Hobart said. ‘Leka Bufi. What happened?’

‘Not exactly sure yet. Bufi was sitting in the chair here, his back to the window, and he got it through the head. One hell of a gun, if that’s what it was. This bullet-proof glass is good against any pistol and most assault rifles.’

‘It’ll stop high-velocity up to 7.62 long,’ the forensics officer said to the wall.

‘You saying someone got a gun in here?’ Hobart asked, inspecting the glass. The hole was large, the size of a tennis ball, and surrounded by a thick black scorch mark.

‘We’re considering everything at the moment,’ the first officer said. ‘Mind if I ask what the FBI is doing here?’

‘Bufi was a name on my case file.’

‘Albanian Mafia?’

Hobart ignored him as he looked at the body outline draped over the table and the dried blood on the floor and wall.

‘Took most of his head clean off,’ the officer added.

‘Got it,’ the forensics officer said with satisfaction as he yanked something small out of the wall and inspected it. ‘If that was a gun it sure fired a strange kind of bullet.’

He carried the object in a pair of tweezers and placed it on a plastic evidence bag on the table. They all took a close look at the small, twisted, charred piece of metal the size of a fingernail.

‘Looks like there’s a pattern along one of the edges,’ the forensics officer said, holding a magnifying glass over it. ‘A coin, maybe,’ he added, glancing at his buddy who gave him a surprised look.

Hobart straightened to study the walls and windows of the corridor once again. He was interested in the bit of metal but would wait until the lab report to find out precisely what it was. There was a concentration of pockmarks in the wall and door directly opposite the cubicle, suggesting some kind of back-blast effect from whatever had gone through the window. Hobart had had a lot of experience with explosives, particularly in Kosovo, and had seen many bodies shredded by bits of flying metal from mortars, grenades, artillery shells, mines and booby-traps and such like. He had never seen anything quite like this before, though. If he had to choose a word to describe how it stood out from other examples he had seen, that word would have to be ‘precision’. This had been an IED of some kind, he was sure of that, and it had been small, clean and exact.

Hobart looked back at the two officers who were still examining the piece of metal. ‘Sergeant – or is it Lieutenant?’

‘Sergeant Doves,’ the first officer said.

‘I want every piece of debris collected up – every bit of cloth, metal, glass, everything – and placed inside its own evidence bag and sent to the FBI office on Wilshire.’

Doves looked around at the countless bits covering the floor, some of it stuck to the soles of his own shoes. ‘You gonna be sending down one of your teams?’ he asked hopefully but not expecting much. Resent ment was his underlying response to the request since it meant that he was effectively working for the Feds.

‘Not if you do a good enough job, sergeant,’ Hobart said, looking directly at both men, making his point clear, before walking away.

Stratton leaned against the concrete barrier that skirted the top of Santa Monica’s cliffs a hundred feet above the Pacific Coast Highway, a road that stretched, with some interruptions, from Panama to Alaska. He was pretending to read a newspaper while at the same time keeping an eye on all movement into I Cugini, an Italian restaurant on a corner just south of his apartment building. It had a broad, exposed entrance with quiet sidewalks and most of the clientele arrived by car. After drivers and passengers had alighted the vehicles were whisked away by redwaistcoated valets to an underground parking lot beneath the large, modern shopping complex of which the restaurant was a small part.